Items tagged with HDD

Despite what Apple execs would have you believe with their flowery language, Apple products aren’t perfect. This is especially the case of the Apple faithful that have 27-inch iMacs that were manufactured between December 2012 and September 2013 and include a 3TB HDD. According to Apple, it “has determined that a very small number of 3TB hard drives used in 27-inch iMac systems, may fail under certain conditions.” Owners that have already registered their systems with Apple using a valid email address will automatically be contacted to arrange for a HDD replacement. If you haven’t registered with...Read more...

We've come a long way since the days when hard drives were measured in megabytes. Underscoring that point is the industry's first 10TB enterprise-class HDD, the host-managed Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR built by HGST, a division of Western Digital. HGST says the capacious HDD is intended of next-generation archive applications. The 10TB monster is a helium-based drive, the third of its kind by HGST in the past two years. HGST says it's deployed over a million helium-based HelioSeal HDDs to date and is super confident in the technology's reliability. In the task the new drive was purpose built for...Read more...

The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's in terms of overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Right now you can buy a 4TB hard drive for the same cost as a 256GB SSD, so the two are in separate universes in that regard. We love SSDs and think just about everyone should run their OS on one, but most aren't large enough to hold all user data over a long...Read more...

One day, we'll think back on the concept of a 8TB hard drive and scoff at how puny it sounds. But that day is not today. Today, shipping a 8TB hard drive is an impressive feat, and it is one that has been accomplished by HGST. The storage outfit has just commenced shipments of its 8TB and 6TB HelioSeal platform HDDs, with a path already defined to get these to 10TB very soon. The announcement came as a part of five other introductions, including the release of HGST Virident Space, which allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver one or more shared volumes of high...Read more...

Western Digital this morning hit the storage industry over its head with a couple of new high capacity hard drive options being offered in the company's WD Red line of drives. One is a 5-terabyte HDD and the other is a first-to-market 6-terabyte capacity HDD based on a tightly packed five-platter design, and like all WD Red drives, they're both intended for home and small office NAS systems In addition to these new high capacity storage solutions, Western Digital announced the introduction of its WD Red Pro HDD series available in 1TB to 4TB capacities for the medium and large business NAS markets....Read more...

Overall Seagate Technology closed out its fiscal year (ended June 27, 2014) in good shape. The drive maker reported fourth quarter revenue of $3.3 billion, which was enough to pull a healthy profit of $320 million along with diluted earnings per share of $0.95. It also generated around $577 million in operating cash flow and returned a sizable $166 million to shareholders in the form of dividends and share redemptions. For its full fiscal year 2014, Seagate returned a whopping $2.5 billion to shareholders and raised $1.8 billion in investment grade debt. What this all boils down to is that Seagate...Read more...

In the world of storage, there are natural tradeoffs. Usually, you'll trade a bit of capacity for size, or perhaps size for speed. HGST, which presently sits under the Western Digital umbrella, is pushing the enterprise boundaries a bit with the world's highest capacity 10K RPM hard drive in the 2.5-inch form factor. Designed for compact server use and mission critical applications, the new drive holds a staggering 1.8TB of information (with smaller sizes available if you aren't willing to pony up for the flagship). The Ultrastar C10K1800 holds 50% more than prior generations of the same drive...Read more...

When SSDs hit the market, it was a revolution in terms of storage speeds, unlocking a serious performance bottleneck over slower (but generally higher-capacity and much less expensive HDDs), but a team of Japanese researchers has developed technology that could significantly boost SSD performance while also making NAND flash-based devices more energy efficient. Specifically, the research team has run simulations that improves write speeds by 300%; reduces power consumption by 60%; and decreases write/erase cycles by 55%. Even better, because the solution is in the SSD’s middleware and not...Read more...

Another day, another batch of mobile hard drives to store your ever-growing library of memories and documents. Seagate has today announced that its Wireless Plus mobile storage family has added a 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB version. Plus, there's now integration with popular cloud storage platforms such as Google Drive and Dropbox. In essence, these drives enable media that's stored to be easily streamed on nearby mobile devices -- everything from a Galaxy Tab to an iPhone to a Kindle Fire or a Surface 2. If you just don't have enough internal storage on your mobile device, or you have multiple kids looking...Read more...

Pictures, videos, and other forms of digital data aren't getting any smaller, and you may find that your tablet or smartphone is suddenly short on space. There are a variety of solutions available, one of them being Toshiba's new Canvio Wireless Adapter, a simple yet creatively designed gadget that adds wireless networking capabilities to any traditional external hard drive. There's no rocket science involved here -- simply connect the adapter to an external HDD and a USB power source. Once you've done that, you can proceed to share, stream and access the drive's contents wirelessly from any network-enabled...Read more...

You may not have heard of Supertron Electronics before, but over in India, the company's name is much better known. Supertron has a longstanding relationship with Seagate which, for thirteen years, existed as an import partner and sub-distributor. In 2006, Supertron became an official Seagate National Distributor, giving Seagate an extended presence in India and local areas. Apparently some unscrupulous folks have decided to take advantage of both company's good names. According to Supertron Electronics, gray market dealers are importing fake Seagate hard drives, rebadging them as Supertron models,...Read more...

Lian Li makes some killer cases, but the company is not above gathering input from users on designs and features. The latest chassis it’s soliciting feedback on is the prototype for the PC-A51, which is in the same line as the PC-A05N. As it stands, the PC-A51 is a nice-looking case, sporting a black-and-red look that combines clean lines with pops of color. Key features include support for 240/280mm radiators, 30mm of space behind the motherboard tray for better cable management, a tool-less HDD bay system, and a front-mounted PSU designed to let users take more advantage of the available...Read more...

When it comes to choosing a storage scheme, there are couple of cost effective solutions for power users. One is to install a solid state drive (SSD) for the OS and programs, and a spacious hard disk drive (HDD) for storing photos, videos, and other data hogging files. A second option is to invest in a solid state hybrid drive, which is an HDD with an SSD cache buffer for frequently accessed programs. Both are serviceable, though both have tradeoffs (the first takes up two storage slots, and the second isn't as fast as a dedicated SSD). There's now a third solution courtesy of Western Digital,...Read more...